Moderates United

I am working on a post that I will eventually put more work into than normal, but thought I would share in the meantime that, while sometimes these posts just flow out, to the extent that I almost can’t NOT write them, some are very painful.

If I had to point to one single factor in the persistence of stupidity in intelligent people, I think it could most easily be summarized as an unwillingness to suffer.  All smart people, if they remain truly open, will find their way eventually.  But countless people who make thinking the main purpose of their lives–academics and intellectuals–persist in stupidity in large numbers across long lifetimes.

I deal in aches daily I am long accustomed to, which I cannot avoid.  Adding to these aches by purposefully opening myself to insights and ideas whose course I can’t predict, which go I know not where, is really no extra work.  I do not have strong willpower, I don’t think: I am simply stuck in a moment, and one aspect of that moment is that confronting things which terrify most people is no extra work most of the time.  In any event, I am in the habit of doing it.

I am watching Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou at the moment, and will now return, now that my tea is done.

I will comment too that much of the French New Wave, Existentialism, and literature and art generally in Europe since World War 1 has to be seen in the context of the horrors of war.  No one escaped.  If you, your father or grandfather, brother or son did not serve, those of people you know did.  Many of them were scarred permanently psychologically, and shared their unprocessed grief and rage with everyone around them.  They raised children, married wives, worked jobs.  They took your money at the train station, sold you flowers, and walked their dogs in the parks.

Who we might become in a truly sustained peace, not filled with insane propaganda, it is hard to say, but I think the default of most human beings is peace and tranquility.  We have savage beasts within us, but we are not savage beasts.  We are humans, which makes us complex, with many possibilities.

Someone who, seeing Kim Jung Un walk across the DMZ, thinks immediately: My god, this might hurt us in the mid-terms.

Would it not be a much more beautiful world if I were exaggerating in the slightest?

Find genuinely idealistic people to consolidate power in the public interest.  Teach them to use the power beneficently, such that people embrace it.  Gradually aggregate latent functional, but not explicit, power in their hands. Then kill them and take over, once the surveillance and police state is a fait accompli.

I will contextualize this by sharing a link I found, on a documentary examining the claim that Hitler survived World War 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=608&v=Gw1hgOlHTD4

Data points include the seeming fact that no fragment of Hitler or Eva Braun’s bodies were ever found, with the skull shard which was claimed to be Hitler’s having been shown to be that of a 40 year old woman; that both Stalin and Eisenhower doubted accounts of Hitler’s death; the sophistication of the ODESSA operation; eyewitness accounts, as shown in the documentary; and the seeming fact of a house being found deep in the jungle which would have been exactly the sort of house one would expect Hitler to live in.  This is a short list.

The Nazis had a considerable amount of planning dedicated to all contingencies–Faelle, I believe is the German–and it is not inconceivable that Hitler not only continued to exercise some influence from the shadows, but that he also found Nazi loot ably invested and used by competent adherents and accomplices to continue the same rough goals.  Whether or not he had literal clones, does it seem unreasonable to suppose, if he did survive, that he had many IDEOLOGICAL clones?

Operation Paperclip is, now, well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

What if all these Nazis knew Hitler lived?  What if the American government explicitly helped make it happen, by which I mean to say, the OSS as run by Allen Dulles, as a means of guaranteeing their loyalty?  Jerome Corsi raises the question, without of course being able to answer it.  I have never been much of a Kennedy conspiracy buff, other than to point out that Oswald’s Communism was his most likely motivation, possibly buttressed by specific orders from Castro, but it does seem ODD, now that I know about it, that the equivalent of a John Brennan–but much more powerful John Brennan–was one seventh of the committee investigating the death of the man who fired him.  I mean Allen Dulles, of course.

What if Captain America: Winter Soldier is much too close to the truth?

I can’t know, but the objective of limiting government power has never been more relevant and important than it is in the days of Big Data, Big Brother, and Big Technology.

And is it not ODD that the Left has been taught to value everything the Nazis valued, all while believing–as indeed the Nazis did–that they occupy the higher moral ground, and that they are foot soldiers in something historic and monumental?

No: of course not.  This is the plan.

I will note, though, that if this account is true, Juan Peron must have known, and must have agreed to the whole thing.  Hitler and Peron were quite similar, I suspect, although I have not studied Peron much at all. When you are dealing with a cult of personality, the psychology, and the political objectives and methods, cannot vary all that much.

I felt marching armies in the distance, but I was at peace.  I don’t know what it all means.  It could all be major intrapsychic conflict.  That is certainly a possibility.

This one was quite large.  I was talking tough.  I was telling it “give me your best shot, tough guy”.  Literally.  I know, it’s like bad movie dialogue, but I don’t know what to say.  I felt reasonably sure it couldn’t hurt me, and it didn’t. I was telling it it belonged in hell, and it was hissing quite a bit at me.  It was not happy.  I am blogging because I did not want to go immediately back to bed.

I am feeling, though, that it is past time I grew up and dealt with my fear of death.  According to my own beliefs, it is irrational.  And even if I am wrong, even if that is it, I will never know.  The universe will simply turn its slow rotations without me.  But that is not what I feel to be true.  I have seen too much not to believe in higher and invisible powers of various sorts.

I do think I perhaps get a bit too arrogant for my own good sometimes.  But I also feel I was born to fight, and this can be a symptom. Battle is not for timid people who lack faith in themselves and their skills.

Well, back to bed.  I will report anything interesting.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/03/19/darpa-wants-to-connect-human-brains-and-machines/

Is there anywhere a thirst for global peace, among people who are not naive lunatics?  All weapons, once developed, exist, and can be used by small groups.  All our technology makes asymetrical warfare more effective.  It makes us less safe, over the long haul, since once created it can be duplicated.  Every quantum leap forward might one day be used against us.

Why not establish a Commission on Global Peace, which looks carefully, honestly, and long term ways at how we disempower the war mongers, and create a lasting global peace?

To be sure, I am no believer in commissions, in general, which can only be as good as the people in them, but the GOAL symbolized by such a thing would be worthwhile.

Can we not make a lasting peace with China?  On some level do not some large number of their leaders want a better life for their children and their nation?  Would it not help if they did not need to maintain a large military?  Would it not help if they were not forced to wage an internal civil war against all the enemies of their tyranny?  Could they not perhaps be persuaded to rationalize and reform their internal repression if they could be convinced the United States will never be their military enemy?

And Russia: avoiding war with them is as easy as keeping the globalists away from the buttons of power.

Yes, there are random terrorists, but this is a war of information, not tanks and fighter planes.

Can we not make this an explicit goal, and can we not meet regularly with those who might be our enemies–who might justify the development of robotic squids, and weaponized microdrones, of armed robots, and everything else I don’t know about and have not yet imagined–and ask them what needs to happen for a lasting peace?

Yes, I am absolutely with the “trust but verify” camp, but Reagan oversaw a LARGE decrease in overall armaments, did he not?

Edit: I was also referencing this: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/04/18/army-researchers-are-developing-a-self-aware-robot-squid-you-can-3d-print-in-the-field/

I never know what will happen to me when I fall asleep.  My shaking, screaming, verbalizing and all that are slowly diminishing in amplitude, which has been the goal.  They are not absent, but they have softer edges now.  I can’t quite recall if they happened last night at all, in fact.  This is progress.

But my awareness in my sleep seems to be increasing.  I am doing work while I am sleeping.  It’s piecemeal, haphazard work.  Images and ideas appear to me, in no order.

For example, last night I saw an image of a man I’ve known some time, and came to realize that the whole of his long life has been strongly conditioned by how he was potty trained, so many years ago.  Large systems form from small things.  Freud was not wrong about this. An entire Lebensgestalt can be inferred, sometimes, from the type of soap someone uses.

And I saw how Neurofeedback, one day soon, might be used as a tool for increasing love.  I saw a man and a woman, in a virtual reality space, sharing the visual readouts of the part of their brains which create beauty, love and connection, and merging these images in wonderful ways, in real time.

And it must be said, that the gift of love is much more strongly given to women, in general.  Men are often confused in relationships with women (and, I would suppose, with each other, both in hetero and homosexual ways) because this language does not come naturally to us.  Protectiveness comes naturally.  Sexuality comes naturally.  Love does not.  It is a sort of foreign language in some ways, that we learn to speak with varying degrees of fluency over time, to the continual frustration of women, who cannot understand this.  We say we love women, sometimes, because we have to, but a very large number of us (I feel) are not entirely sure what it is we are supposed to be feeling.  It feels good being with the woman, and we call this love.  This is quite sufficient to get married and have kids, but perhaps not sufficient to stay married in a great many cases.  Statistically, this seems a reasonable statement to make.

And finally I was dreaming about the Rust Belt.  I was up there last week, in a Union town, or what used to be a Union town.  I got in and out without incident, which would likely not have been possible 30 years ago.

I have long blamed the decline of Detroit and everything attached to it to greedy Union bosses, and stupid members.  But what I saw was that there is also a CULTURAL element to this whole thing.  Unions make people feel like they belong.  They are not quite a church, but not quite not a church either.  I know around here, the third shift workers go drink in the Union Hall parking lot when they get off at 5am or so, until the local bar opens at 6am.  There they all are, sitting in the dark, with six packs they brought in coolers. It’s a fellowship, of sorts.

So giving up all that, or risking giving up all that, through Right to Work legislation–or through the types of concessions needed to keep jobs local–is probably LEAST of all an economic risk.  It is a lifestyle risk.  I had not seen that.

On many accounts, the dead live among us.  One of the more interesting ones, from, as I recall, an Eagle Scout and man who became a psychiatrist, is Return from Tomorrow.  The dead can walk through walls, travel at infinite speeds, fly, and are invisible.  Such is my own belief, at any rate, as it applies to spirits who don’t go somewhere better.

Imagine a spy program where recruits are taught all the elements of observation, what to look for, what to take an interest in, then shot to death for graduation.  Imagine such a thing making sense if there were some established means of maintaining contact with them.

This would, if you will pardon the term, be a living spy program.  We could focus on what is essential.  We would not need to capture all elements of every last action of every last human on Earth.

I wonder about a program for precognition too.  How would that work?  If you can “see” the future, can you change it?  This is an old question, asked many times in many science fiction and fantasy novels.

I watched “Edge of Tomorrow” last week, and pondering it, it occurred to wonder what happened to the woman each time after she shot Tom Cruise.  You don’t see those shots.  You just see him getting shot over and over.  Does she look at him, as his lifeless body bleeds out, call a medic to transport him away, then pack off and die the next day every time?  Is each of these events a new universe?   Some physicists would say yes, which means that the real woman (I forget her name, rank, and the actresses name) actually dies thousands of times.  So too does the “real” Tom Cruise, except that some part of his consciousness transitions between universes.  What is he, if his body stops in time, but his mind moves?  I will say that, as a major movie star (as they say) he has over the years picked a lot of conceptually interesting movies, like Vanilla Sky, this one, and Oblivion.

As I think I’ve mentioned–over some time horizon I have probably mentioned EVERYTHING which recurs for me–I have telekinetic powers in my dreams.  I was playing with some bits of paper last night in a dream–moving them around in clouds of different shapes–and it occurred to me that my real arm is actually hollow.  This thought occurred to me in the dream, as I was looking at my dream arm, which was semi-translucent. The matter within it is, from a strictly empirical perspective, nearly as empty as empty space.  The apparent presence of something solid is a sort of electromagnetic trick, when in reality all the molecules within my arm are nearly all empty space.  When we lift something with our limbs, we are practicing, therefore, a species of telekinesis.  All the other kind is is realizing we don’t need what look like arms.  We can project onto space, and to a great extent, control it.

I’m not quite sure what I am saying, but there is truth in it, I feel reasonably certain.  I felt it strongly.

I was pondering the letter Paul Griffiths wrote, where he recommended 3 hours a day devoted to study.  And it occurred to me I spend at least an hour a day in meditation.  Does that count?

Then it occurred to me that, while I have long called myself a “thought worker”, that the term “perception worker” might be more apt for my aspirations.

When you spend an hour living at the level of sensation and subtle affect, you are not thinking.  There are no words.  This is the point: you get beyond thoughts by focusing on the body.

Within the Greek tradition most of our intellectuals live in, there is little room for this sort of activity.  We think of intellectuals as the sorts of people who privilege ideas roughly the way Socrates and Plato did.  But there is so much more, so much that can be perceived, but not spoken.  One can speak of the “unspeakable”, and one can incorporate the “unspeakable” into a philosophical system, but one cannot LIVE it without living it; and having lived it, one can justifiably wonder about the relative importance of ideas for a life well lived, compared to everything that is beyond, outside the fence.

You have to have room for “that”.  “That” has to suffice for some statements, some communications, some understandings, conveyed personally and face to face.

I was sitting in the sauna today, and got to wondering what treating the body literally like a machine might look like.

You could step into some sort of device in the morning which would inject some drug that rendered you unconscious.  Then your muscles could be stimulated in some fashion that mimicked weight lifting physiologically.  Your heart and lungs could be exercised.  You could be tanned, and you could be put through a sauna to improve your vascular health.  All this, without any conscious effort on your part.  You wake up, and the health maintenance part of your day is complete.

Would you assent to such a thing?  Many people would.  They resent effort and work.  They have been bred–that is the word for many–to feel that life without work would be better, and that life with work is drudgery.

But life IS work.  Even love is work, is it not, at least when done over the long term?  Are not all the small moments that make up a life found in the little things, the drudgery, the looking-to-the-other-side through what often seems monotonous, difficult, and dull?

If we are our work, then this machine would be terrible.  Every rep of every exercise I do is a little different.  Every time I stretch it feels a little different.  All these nuances are what create affective and cognitive complexity and what make a mind and self interesting.  People bred to use machines of this sort would be difficult to differentiate from cattle, other than in their use of language.